I was standing in line for my coffee at Barnes & Noble yesterday, and I picked up one of the pre-season baseball assessments. I think it was Rotowire. I skimmed through the first couple of stories and the accompanying charts, and I almost persuaded myself that I wanted to play fantasy baseball again this year. I made a principled decision to quit the game after coming in dead last in my league in 2006, but I was wavering until I looked down the rest of the display rack with 5-6 other publications that purported to offer the best possible data to help me prepare for my fantasy draft. I started to remember the two broad reasons why I quit in the first place and quickly set the magazine back down.

However, I kept thinking about what drove me from the game, and I realized it has no small bearing on other, and much bigger, problems. Allow me to explain.

Hyper-specialization pervades our culture and government.

1) The explosion of publications devoted to fantasy baseball (and fantasy football and even other sports) reflects an unhealthy tendency towards hyper-specialization that pervades our culture (and trust me, living in academia gives me plenty of opportunity to see it). As soon as an activity, even one as innocuous as pretending to be a MLB general manager, catches on, there is someone, somewhere, who will do it full-time and do nothing else. In fact, I now realize that the low point of my fantasy baseball career was winning my league regular season in the summer of 2002. I am an academic. I don’t have to go to my office during the summer, but I went almost every day that year to “research” – not my (still) long overdue book on Rousseau but the number of walks my back-up shortstop drew against left-handed pitching. This unhealthy obsession came at a time when the amount of information available was still fairly modest by today’s standards, but now, someone who becomes infatuated with fantasy baseball could read different team efficiency models and draft projections all day, every day without having exhausted the publicly available information, and someone out there (probably someone in your league) is doing so.

But this problem only masks a deeper one that has much more widespread ramifications. When we have (or to be more precise, we generate) this much information on a particular public activity, issue, or policy, we virtually require people to choose one area of focus and stay on it, incessantly. My friend who won the league in 2006 had managed to destroy a marriage and lose a job over the three years before that, but he had mastered his pitching rotation. And this is just an image of compartmentalization that pervades far more important areas of concern, including our politics and public policy.

President Obama is taking some serious heat now for trying to do too many things; some commentators claim he could not do the economic crisis in the morning and have time left over for health care, education, and science policy in the afternoon. Perhaps President Obama has the healthier, broader view that these issues are not separable, but of course hyper-specialization wants to put each thing in a box and view it in isolation. I am sure it is ultimately impossible to pick the perfect place to draw a line and say that gathering more information about one perspective on any given thing has become counter-productive, but surely there is such a point. Which brings me to the second realization that drove me out of fantasy baseball.

Hyper-specialization distorts our vision.

2) Hyper-specialization leads to distortion of the very things that we think we know most about. As I got some distance on my infatuation with fantasy baseball, I realized it was destroying any real appreciation of baseball. Fantasy teams are pulled together from disparate parts, take this guy from one team and that guy from another. In fact, one of the cardinal rules of effective fantasy teams is never to draw too many players from one team and especially not from your favorite team.

This leads, of course, to viewing baseball in an odd and almost unnatural sort of way. I found myself wanting my beloved Atlanta Braves to win games, but I wanted to see Albert Pujols get an extra-base hit against John Smoltz because Pujols was my first baseman and Smoltz was my brother’s pitcher. I was disappointed when my team’s players reached base on an error because it was doing nothing for my on base percentage, and I actively rooted for good players to get hurt so that my opponent’s fantasy teams would be weaker.

I would argue that hyper-specialization always distorts our view of the very things we claim to know and care about. We can’t help but redefine the real thing in terms that match the “game” that we have become experts at playing. I think the Obama administration has been singularly unsuccessful at avoiding this problem thus far, and I fear that this failure will undermine the more synoptic view of our “economic crisis” (which is also a health care crisis, education crisis, urban and rural policy crisis, etc.).

President Obama admires and trusts intelligent people (so far so good, and much better than his predecessor), but he seems too inclined to equate intelligence with hyper-specialization. Faced with market failures, he has gone out and stocked Treasury, Commerce, and the Council of Economic Advisors with “market experts” who are not at all unlike ESPN’s “Fantasy Insiders.” They know alot about the markets as a certain type of game and seem intent on maximizing our ability to play the game as they understood it (too often as investment bankers) well.

What they may lack is any critical perspective on the game that they have specialized in playing. Market (re-)construction has a habit of becoming like fantasy baseball. We try to maximize certain metrics without considering how the over-emphasis on those metrics may distort or even undermine other goals that we have. We too often hire people who have shown that they can really do one thing when maybe we should be reconsidering whether or not that is what we should be doing. Larry Summers, Timothy Geithner, et al. may have many insights into why the markets suddenly and disastrously quit working to advance the game that we were recently playing, but they are unlikely to ask whether that was the right game.

Allow me one example that will be only suggestive and very controversial but that reminds us of a question that should be asked: Health Care.

Adam Smith (and others since him) argued that the great advantage of a market economy is that it increases the “wealth of nations” and the well-being of their citizens. Of course, “well-being” includes the physical security of enjoying good health, but we know that the current market mechanisms for health care make virtually no provision for this for many of our citizens now.

Furthermore, as Karen Tumulty’s recent article in Time and other reports have documented, health care insecurity is intimately tied into the recent spiral of bankruptcies and foreclosures as millions of Americans are “one diagnosis away” from financial disaster. And yet, some would have us believe that fixing the capital markets and/or the housing markets is a “separate game” than reforming our health care system. We should put off the latter until we deal with the former. This may be like putting off rooting for your team to win the pennant so you can make sure that some pitcher on your fantasy roster can keep Walks and Hits Per Inning Pitched close to 1.4.

Perhaps it’s time to reconsider how deeply we want to invest ourselves in those types of games.